


Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat

by commoncomitatus



Series: Hold Me Till Winter [2]
Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: 3 Sentence Fiction, Mild Sexual Content, Multi, Polyamory, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27244687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: A series of three-sentence ficlets exploring the various romantic and intimate relationships between and among our four heroes.
Relationships: Tripitaka/Sandy/Monkey/Pigsy (The New Legends of Monkey), Various Relationships
Series: Hold Me Till Winter [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2050350
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat

**Author's Note:**

> A twofold exercise in stepping out from my comfort zones: in the first an attempt at brevity, and in the second an exploration of different character and ship combinations.
> 
> Or, an attempt to reconcile my own personal discomfort around particular ship dynamics with my earnest and heartfelt hopes for a happy, polyamorous four-way endgame.
> 
> Prompt Table(s) shamelessly stolen from the now-defunct 1sentence community on the also-mostly-defunct LiveJournal.
> 
> N.B.  
> Complete and absolute disregard for punctuation and grammar rules, as seems to be the norm for this type of fic challenge. ;)
> 
> The 'Various Relationships' tag pretty much stands for 'every possible combination of the main four'... hopefully all treated with equal weight and respect. Each ficlet is a self-contained, stand-alone work, with pairings noted beside the prompt (if only the POV character is named, assume that all four are involved in some capacity), so it should be easy to skip whatever hits your squicks.

**

**01\. motion (tripitaka)**

She may not look like much next to three gods, but in some ways Tripitaka is the toughest of them all.

Pigsy, they learn the hard way, suffers from terrible seasickness; Sandy starts to retch just from watching Monkey perform tricks on his cloud; and Monkey, loathe as he is to admit it, gets panic attacks whenever they take one of those underground carriages they use on the fourth continent.

“It’s just not _natural_ ,” he gripes, and Tripitaka shakes her head and wonders how she managed to fall in love with the only three gods in the known world who all suffer from motion sickness.

**02\. cool (tripitaka/sandy)**

Being with Sandy is like drinking from a cool, still pond.

Mostly quiet, mostly calm, but disturbed now and then by ripples of confusion; it’s being touched by a god who still doesn’t quite understand what that means, a god who spent her whole life being told she was something else; it’s finding a rhythm with someone as fragile and vulnerable as a human, the only god she’s ever met who breathes like she’s mortal.

Tripitaka breathes too, because she is mortal, because she is human, and she drinks deep from that cool, still pond and lets herself imagine she can’t drown.

**03\. young (sandy/monkey/pigsy)**

The day she asks Monkey and Pigsy if she can join them, she worries.

She worries because she knows how young she is next to them both, because she’s seen the way they look at her when they think she’s not paying attention, because she knows what it means; she worries that they’ll think she’s simple because it takes her so long to understand things, and she worries that they’ll think she’s immature because she talks to inanimate objects and sleeps sometimes with her thumb in her mouth for comfort, and she worries that they’ll laugh at her and turn her away.

Instead, they look at her like she’s older than the two of them combined, and they speak in hushed, respectful tones about all the things she’s been through, and they say “Of course,” like it was never a question at all.

**04\. last (monkey)**

He’d never admit it to the others, but Pigsy’s kind of his favourite.

The others have their pluses, of course: Tripitaka with her passion and her surety, the way she always knows what she wants and how to make him give it; Sandy with the way she’s always so easy to impress, the way she’ll respond to anything because everything is new and uncharted territory; the two of them and their strange-but-thrilling blend of warm-and-cool, want-and-need, give-and-take... they’re great, really, and he digs them both.

But Pigsy knows how to make it _last_ , and to a god with over five hundred years of fun to make up for, that really counts for a lot.

**05\. wrong (monkey/tripitaka)**

He’s been wrong about her more times than he can count.

Misjudging her, underestimating her, dismissing her ideas, even when he knows they’re better than his, just because she’s human; he’s wrong every single time, and a part of him is terrified — no, _convinced_ — that next time will be the last time, next time will be the final straw, next time she’ll turn around and walk away and say “No more, that’s enough, we’re done.”

She’s so much braver now than she was: she tells him off, stands up for herself, never backs down... and he hopes — with every breath in his body, he hopes — that maybe she’ll prove him wrong about this too.

**06\. gentle (tripitaka)**

She has to remind them, every time, not to be gentle.

Pigsy and Monkey especially, tied up as they are with their presumptions about human fragility; Sandy doesn’t know her own strength, and she doesn’t really understand the differences between their bodies anyway, but Monkey and Pigsy are older and smarter and their centuries of experience make them experts.

So they claim, anyway, and no matter how many times Tripitaka tells them they’re wrong, still they touch her every time like they think she’s made of glass.

**07\. one (sandy)**

She’d spent a lifetime alone, just her and her reflection: two copies of the same thing, it turned out, still added up to only one.

Now they were four, and she was a part of that four, and she didn’t understand how to fit into an equation that was suddenly three times bigger than the one she knew; she didn’t know where to put her feet and when to smother her voice, she didn’t know what to do or how to speak or act or behave, she didn’t know anything at all... and though they never said so, she could tell they got annoyed sometimes at having to explain the same simple things over and over again.

She tried to explain once, why it was so difficult to be like them, to be normal, to be a part of something bigger than one; she tried to explain why she was the way she was, but they just laughed, all three of them together, and said she was perfect.

**08\. thousand (monkey/pigsy)**

They’re the only ones who really get what it means: a thousand years, and five centuries on top.

Tripitaka counts it all out with the mind-bending disbelief of a human, one who won’t live to see a tenth of those years, and Sandy whispers it like a source of dread, scared and sort of sickened by the idea that she might one day see that many years herself; it’s unfathomable to them, young as they are, but to Pigsy and Monkey it’s barely a drop in the bucket, an echo of a world destroyed centuries before the other two were even born.

They laugh, they cry, they reminisce, and sometimes they feel so old it hurts, but the memory is theirs and they get to share it together, and that’s a whole lot more than they can say for their fallen brethren.

**09\. king (monkey)**

He doesn’t mind, really, that none of the others call him ‘king’.

The rest of the world does it, and that’s good enough for him.

He’ll never admit it, but it feels more personal, maybe more intimate, that they just roll their eyes and call him ‘just Monkey’, like it’s some kind of insult and not the warmest, most family-like thing he’s ever heard in his life.

**10\. learn (monkey)**

They teach him together.

The four of them, three gods and a human, huddled around some dusty old scroll or book or parchment, sounding out the stupid letters one by one and laughing as he tries and fails to fit them on his tongue.

They teach him together, word by word, symbol by symbol, and he would never admit it to anyone but sometimes he pretends not to learn on purpose, just so they’ll keep teaching.

**11\. blur (pigsy/sandy)**

She’s intangible, uncatchable: a blur of mist and vapour, impossible to hold down.

She turns to mist under his hands, vanishes like smoke and reappears ten feet away, sometimes smiling, sometimes shuddering, sometimes somewhere in between; she disappears and reappears, dissolves and rematerialises, she comes and goes and never stays still, sometimes by intent and sometimes by instinct, but always by her own control.

It makes the other times mean more, he thinks: the rare and blessed moments when he reaches out and finds something solid.

**12\. wait (sandy/tripitaka)**

“You waited your whole life for me,” Tripitaka says, and then: “Was it worth it?”

Sandy looks down at her: naked and beautiful, slack and sated and shimmering with post-coital afterglow, she looks now just as she always imagined she would, all those years alone with nothing else to feed her; she looks, too, just as she did the day they first met, bathed then as now in the faint, ethereal radiance of the moon.

“Oh, yes,” she breathes, as awestruck now as she was back then, “it was worth every second.”

**13\. change (pigsy/sandy)**

He thinks he might be the only one to really notice how much she’s changed.

She smiles now, lighting up like a child at the smallest and simplest things; she finds joy in smallness, elation in nothing at all, she looks at the world around her and for probably the first time in her wretched life she sees more than just its teeth.

She has been reborn since joining the quest, transformed at last into someone who wants to be alive, and the fact that she allows him to see it makes him feel honoured and privileged and so, so unworthy.

**14\. command (pigsy/monkey)**

It’s no secret that Former General Pigsy is a whole lot better at taking commands than giving them.

Perhaps rather more surprising, this extends beyond the battlefield: namely, to the bedroom, and specifically, to Monkey’s borrowed bedroom in a run-down old inn, where they find themselves on just the right side of intoxicated, just the right side of aroused, and _precisely_ the right side of really bloody good at this.

It’s not the first, or even the twentieth, time he’s let Monkey boss him around... but maybe, if he’d just stop smirking about it for a second, it’ll be the first time he lets him know how much he enjoys it too.

**15\. hold (tripitaka/monkey/sandy)**

They hold her so fiercely in their sleep.

Monkey, ever the protector, ever the guardian even when his own guard is down, wraps her up in his arms and sleeps with his jaw clenched in a warning to any who might come close, while Sandy coils herself around her body like some kind of mythical serpent, clinging and holding on for dear life, like she’s afraid she’ll wake up one day and find her gone.

Tripitaka doubts they even realise they’re doing it; some days she thinks about telling them, but she’s afraid that finding out would make them stop.

**16\. need (pigsy)**

He tends their every need, and they don’t even know it.

Monkey never thinks anything of it when a second helping of stew somehow finds its way into his bowl, unasked and unprompted; Sandy doesn’t seem to notice the way her cloak is miraculously less holey now than it was two days ago; Tripitaka never questions how her bedroll came to acquire an extra blanket the morning after a night of shivering; none of them notice a blasted thing, and they certainly don’t look to him for the source.

After a lifetime of being rewarded for doing terrible things, he can’t help thinking it feels kind of fitting, watching his good deeds slip under the radar.

**17\. vision (monkey)**

Before the rock, his vision was so clear and so perfect he could see the whole length of the world.

Now it takes him hours to count every freckle on Tripitaka’s face, now it takes him hours to pick apart all the tangled threads of Sandy’s hair, now it takes him hours and hours and hours to make out each food-stain on Pigsy’s shirt; before the rock, he could have done all those things in seconds, and given them all the care and attention they deserved, never even blinking.

Now he has to do it the old-fashioned way, squinting like some old, decrepit human, and he’s not sure he believes them when they say the time spent is half the reward.

**18\. attention (tripitaka/monkey)**

He assumed he was irresistible, the centre of everyone’s attention, desired by everyone, gods or humans or even demons.

“No-one’s immune to the Monkey King’s charms,” he’d crowed once, and she had naively believed herself the exception.

It was the one and only time she was happy to admit she was wrong.

**19\. soul (sandy/tripitaka)**

She never believed she had a soul.

Demon, monster, nightmare: a thousand names, each more horrible than the last, and she had lived with them for so long she couldn’t imagine any other truth for herself; she was a thing, worse even than the wild beasts that gnawed on bones in the dark, without a name and without a heart and certainly without a soul.

But then she came — _Tripitaka_ — and in the warmth of her eyes and the softness of her voice Sandy felt that centuries-dead ember inside her chest begin at last to glow.

**20\. picture (sandy/monkey/pigsy)**

It’s some famous human painter who asks, “Might I create a masterpiece to immortalise the three legendary gods?”

Monkey, beaming and preening, already has his tunic halfway off before he’s finished saying ‘yes’; Pigsy, somewhat shyer but never able to resist basking in someone else’s admiration, grins and shrugs his assent and spends the next ten minutes trying to manoeuvre himself under one of Monkey’s excessively bulging biceps.

Sandy wants to say ‘no’, wants to run and hide; she is frightened, she is intimidated, she is exposed... but then they hold out their hands, the two of them, and reach for her in a way that says ‘it’s okay, you’re safe, we’re here’, and she thinks that maybe she wouldn’t mind seeing such a thing immortalised after all.

**21\. fool (pigsy)**

Pigsy loves to play the fool.

Pretending that he doesn’t see or hear anything, pretending he’s so wrapped up in his own gluttony and laziness — “When are we stopping?” or “What’s for lunch?” — that he pays no heed to anything going on around him; he finds a secret little thrill in their frustration, in Monkey’s insults and Tripitaka’s eye-rolls and Sandy’s confusion, how easy it is to make them see only what they’ve already decided is true.

It’s the biggest thrill in the world, the times when the perfect gift or gesture ‘just happens’ to manifest itself at exactly the right time in exactly the right place in front of exactly the right bedroll, to wide-eyed surprise and joy; there’s nothing better than the way they turn to stare at him, disbelief overpowering their delight, and blurt out, as if there was any doubt, “You were actually paying attention!?”

**22\. mad (sandy)**

She knows they think she’s mad; there’s nothing new in that.

It’s been that way as long as she can remember; even as a child, fragile and mostly human, she was the strange one, the weird one, the one who didn’t do or say or think normal things; a lifetime of isolation and loneliness did nothing to knock that out of her, and by the time Tripitaka and the others appeared to pull her out of the dark, her course was already set: madness, like a thorn lodged so deep inside her there was no hope of digging it out.

They’ve always thought she’s mad, everyone she’s ever met... but here, now, she thinks she may have stumbled on the only three people in the world who don’t mind.

**23\. child (tripitaka)**

When she was a child, the Scholar told her she would one day find a place in the world where she belonged.

She didn’t believe it then; looking around at her surroundings, the monastery with its cracked walls, the nearby mountains all crumbling and old, the towns and villages beyond, full of frightened, desperate people, she couldn’t imagine any part of this world being a place she’d want to live, much less a place she’d want to belong.

Now, years later, she watches over her sleeping gods — her friends, her lovers, her family — and she wishes he could have lived to see just how right he was.

**24\. now (pigsy/tripitaka)**

He’s not ashamed to admit he puts the little monk on a pedestal.

Everything he’s done, everything he’s achieved and become, everything he is, it’s all because of her; he’s a whole different person now than he was before, and there are days when he looks back on his old life — the decadence and the indifference, the way he could turn a blind eye to the suffering of others without sparing a thought — and doesn’t recognise the creature he was.

He’s not sure he really recognises the creature he is now either, but she says — and he’s pretty sure she’s right, because isn’t she always? — that’s called growth.

**25\. shadow (sandy)**

She only lets them touch her in the dark.

The deepest shadows, the places touched by coldest night, the secret spaces where even the clear-eyed Monkey can’t see without squinting; she only strips down there, where even the moon can’t find her, can’t throw its damning light over her body, can’t show them the other kinds of darkness, the kind that burns white-on-white against her skin.

They know, of course, and that’s bad enough: the way their eyes get soft, the way they flinch when she talks about it, the way her hurts seem to hurt them too... she cannot spare them from knowing, but she can, at least, spare them from having to see.

**26\. goodbye (all)**

They’ve lost and found and lost each other so many times over the years, they’ve learned to never say goodbye.

Even when they’re only parting ways for a few hours — gathering firewood, hunting food, scavenging or buying supplies in some nearby village or another, whatever — they will never, ever dare say it; they’re all afraid, though none of them will ever admit to such a silly superstition, that the day they say the word, it’ll be the last time.

So they say other things instead — “See you soon!” or “Don’t take too long!” or a dozen other sweet and senseless nothings — and pretend they’re not all holding their breath until they’re back together again.

**27\. hide (monkey/pigsy)**

It’s not shame; that’s not why they hide.

Stolen moments of passion or tenderness, a thousand leagues away from their usual back-and-forth of spite and sarcasm and squabbling; here, alone, their touches are tender, their whispers warm and fond, but only ever here and only ever alone: far enough from their camp that the others couldn’t possibly overhear.

It’s not shame, not of what they are or what they do; it’s just that they have a reputation to uphold, and neither one of them is ready to let that go.

**28\. fortune (pigsy/tripitaka)**

Fortune and its bloody Wheel... Pigsy never believed in any of that stuff before.

Before Tripitaka showed up and spun that blasted Wheel so hard it fell off its axis, before she dragged him into the spokes along with her, bumped and jostled and battered more than a god ever should be at the hands of a human; before she flashed that smile, the one he never could say ‘no’ to, even on day bloody one, and bade him take a chance, throw himself to fate, see which way that bloody Wheel of Fortune would turn.

He’s still not sure he really believes in it, to tell the truth... but some nights when the others are asleep, when it’s just him and her awake and mulling over the next day’s plans, when she looks up at him and smiles that same blasted smile that sucked him in all those years ago, he can’t help thinking that there might be something to it, after all; what else, other than Fortune, could explain him getting so lucky?

**29\. safe (sandy/tripitaka)**

“You’re safe,” Tripitaka whispers, and holds her so tight it’s like she’s trying to crush the bad dreams to death.

Sandy doesn’t know if she believes it, doesn’t know if there’s anything left of the part of her that once did; she’s fairly sure it got kicked out of her long ago, lost to some back-alley or hidey-hole, trampled into pieces by demons or humans or gnawed by rats like the rest of her, devoured and destroyed until all that remained were memories and nightmares like these.

She’s never been safe, she doesn’t know what ‘safe’ is supposed to feel like; she only knows that when Tripitaka holds her and and whispers that she is, it’s almost enough to make her forget why she’s not.

**30\. ghost (sandy)**

She sees things that don’t exist.

Spectres, phantoms, ghosts: shadows in the shadows, glimmers in the hazy spaces between real and not; it’s unsettling, the way she flinches at nothing, the way she responds to things the others can’t see or hear or understand, unsettling because it’s strange, because she’s strange, because she always has been, but unsettling too because it is hers and only hers.

However deeply they love her, however desperately they may wish they could understand, this is a part of her that none of them will ever be able to touch.

**31\. book (tripitaka/pigsy)**

It’s their thing.

Monkey doesn’t like to read anything longer than his own name, and even that with copious amounts of grumbling; Sandy devours texts like water in the desert, ravenous and thirsty, tearing into each word like it’s a treasure trove of truth, a world of creation just waiting to be explored; in one of them it’s too much, in the other too little.

But for Pigsy and Tripitaka, curled up in front of the fire with a story-book or a theological text, pausing briefly here and there to muse upon this theory or that plot-point, they strike a balance that’s just about perfect.

**32\. eye (pigsy)**

He’s always had an eye for beauty.

Fine-looking clothes, fine-looking food, fine-looking people; if it looks good, tastes good, feels good, he’s always been the first in line to get his hands on it.

Or so it used to be, anyway; nowadays, surrounded in three directions by three unique kinds of beauty, he finds his eye no longer strays very far from home.

**33\. never (monkey/sandy)**

He laughs when she says, “I’ve never done this before.”

He laughs because of course it’s hyperbole — because it has to be, because he can’t fathom anything else — and then he stops because she’s not laughing too, because she’s looking at him, naked and exposed and suddenly vulnerable, and the laughter dies in his throat because no, it’s not hyperbole, she’s serious: all those human lifetimes down there in the dark, of course he’d be the first, where else would she have had the chance?

“Huh,” he says, and then he elbows her and he grins, and he says, because he knows it’ll make her laugh a little bit too, “Lucky for you, I’m a _really_ good teacher.”

**34\. sing (pigsy)**

He sings because he loves it.

To Tripitaka, the hymns of the old gods, the richness of the ancient language taking on an ethereal, magical quality as she picks up the tune and hums along; to Sandy, old folk songs and lullabies, soothing her to sleep on the bad nights, a balm for the places nothing but poetry can touch; to Monkey, lusty battle-songs, anthems of wars won centuries ago, the air growing hot as their power takes hold of them both, fervour and hunger and the bite of nostalgia for a world only they two remember.

He sings because he loves it, and he sings because he loves them.

**35\. sudden (all)**

It was sudden, and it was gradual, and it was everything in between.

Some of them danced around each other from the moment they met, the moment of manifestation all but inevitable: Monkey and Pigsy and the world-shaking thundercrack of discovering that their rivalry had always shrouded deeper feelings; Sandy, gazing starry-eyed at Tripitaka in the golden light of dawn, realising for the first time that _devotion_ was another word for _love_ ; Tripitaka, human and full of the Scholar’s insight, watching her three stupid, beautiful gods and waiting for them to figure it out.

It took them longer to come together as a group; inevitable too, in its own way, but more gradual, more natural: like stars sprinkling the night sky, individual but united, drifting endlessly and eternally towards the same destination.

**36\. stop (monkey/sandy)**

He reads her body, because she doesn’t use her words; he doesn’t blame her for that — he’s not exactly coherent right in the middle of things either — but the stuff she doesn’t say is important, and so he’s learned to depend on other ways of hearing it on the days when when her voice and her body freeze up.

She doesn’t tell him to stop, but he feels it in the locking of her muscles, sees it in the way her throat spasms and her eyes go wide with panic; he pulls out as quickly as he can, and he finds that little smile that’s just for her, just for this, and he says, “It’s good, you’re good, we’re good,” as if there was ever any doubt.

She doesn’t speak — he doesn’t expect her to — but she lies back and she lets him hold her, and when she finally finds it in her to smile back, he feels like the greatest lover in the world.

**37\. time (monkey/sandy)**

“Tell me,” she says, as he kisses her temple, “about the time before.”

The time she never knew, she means; the time he lived and lost, the time that slipped through his fingers, wasted and wished away, before he knew what a precious thing it was; the time when a god like her could have thrived, could have been happy and healthy, when she could have known from the start, what it meant to belong.

She knows it now, he supposes, and that’s enough; still, as he readies himself to tell her again, he leaves out, for her sake, the things he knows she’ll never have.

**38\. wash (pigsy/sandy)**

It’s the deepest intimacy in the world, the day she asks him to wash her wounds.

He, who inflicted more than his fair share over the years, who is probably responsible for at least a few of those awful scars he’s seen running down her body, who she still doesn’t trust completely, and with good reason; there’s bad blood between them, they both know that, and he wouldn’t have blamed her for an instant if she’d never let her guard down around him at all.

Instead she’s here, baring her chest, her shoulders, her weak spots and her points of pain, and she’s asking him to wash the blood off wounds that, for once, he tried to protect her from.

**39\. torn (monkey/pigsy)**

There’s a roughness they get to indulge with each other and no-one else.

Torn clothes, teeth-marks left on the skin, tight grip and tension and the kind of unrestrained, unfettered strength neither one of them would ever think to use with the others; Monkey is unafraid of hurting Pigsy, and Pigsy knows perfectly well that Monkey can take anything he can throw at him and a whole lot more besides.

No-one’s ever really _equal_ to the Monkey King, they both know that... but Pigsy’s as close as he’s likely to find this side of Heaven, and they’re both more than happy to push his limits.

**40\. history (monkey)**

History says this about the Monkey King: that he turned on his own kind, that he stole a crown and stole the sacred scrolls and handed the world over to the demons.

Once, not so long ago, that version of history got to him; he was wounded, he was upset, he was angry.

Now, he lies sandwiched between two beautiful gods and one incredible human, and he thinks about all those lies and false accusations they spent centuries spreading about him, and he pulls Tripitaka closer on one side, Sandy closer on the other, and he rests his head on Pigsy’s warm, welcoming chest, and wonders how he ever cared about anything else at all.

**41\. power (tripitaka)**

She sees in their powers a reflection of their hearts.

In Monkey, all flamboyance and ferocity, she sees a guardian and a protector, the kind of folklore hero who would throw himself onto his enemy’s sword if he thought it would save the ones he loved; in Pigsy, lightning and thunder and the cracking of the earth, she sees passion, she sees warmth, she sees the night sky lit up from below, illuminating everything and everyone it touches; in Sandy, speed and stealth and silence, she sees a different kind of strength, the kind that holds itself back, that fears itself perhaps more than its enemies.

She sees them all, beautiful and dangerous and breathtaking, and every time Pigsy summons his lightning or Monkey summons his cloud or Sandy summons her mist, she thinks of how blessed she must be, to be loved by all the elements all at once.

**42\. bother (monkey/tripitaka)**

He tells her not to bother: she’s human, he’s a god, she couldn’t really please him properly anyway.

It’s a lie, of course, and a bad one; she has to know by now that she’s as talented as any god, that there are a thousand things she could do that would leave him weak-kneed for a week; she’s smarter than him by far, he’d have to be a much bigger idiot than he is to imagine he’d ever be able to fool her with this.

Still, though, he says it, because it’s less of a blow to his ego than admitting the truth: that the all-powerful Monkey King, Great Sage Equal of Heaven, saviour of the known world, likes it better on his knees.

**43\. god (tripitaka/monkey)**

He was everything and nothing like the god she’d imagined.

The arrogance, the ego, the selfishness: none of that was in the scrolls, none of that had featured into her frequent daydreams and adolescent fantasies.

But the wit and the warmth, the sculpted perfection of his shoulders and his chest, the way he flashed his teeth like he knew what a weapon they were... _that_ , she had to admit, came pretty damn close.

**44\. wall (tripitaka/monkey/pigsy)**

Tripitaka wakes with a wall of warmth on both sides.

To her left, Monkey, fast asleep and snoring gently; to her right, Pigsy, snoring not nearly so gently but still in perfect rest; splayed across her belly, their hands find each other, fingers entwined in sleep.

Lazy, languid, and so, so loved, she lets her eyes slide shut and lets their warmth seep into her bones.

**45\. naked (pigsy/tripitaka)**

He’s never much liked his own body.

Centuries of cruel comments, cutting jokes, centuries of gods like Monkey saying ‘big’ like he didn’t know they really meant ‘fat’, centuries of being told he was the wrong kind of specimen, the bad example, the warning to younger recruits of what’ll happen to their flawless godly physique if they let themselves go.

Centuries of that, and yet here he is, stark naked and waiting for the self-loathing to hit, and Tripitaka is staring up at him, and the word on her lips isn’t ‘big’ or ‘fat’ or any of that: it’s _powerful_ , and it’s said with such awe, such reverence, such impossible human honesty, that he can’t help but let himself believe it.

**46\. drive (pigsy/tripitaka/sandy)**

Tripitaka is his motivation; Sandy is his drive.

Sandy, forged in the fires started by gods like him, is a constant reminder of his past, the things he did and the thing he was; she pushes him forwards, driving him away and away and away from that side of himself, away from the shallowness, the selfishness, the emptiness, away from the willingness to bring harm to others if it meant bringing pleasure to himself.

Tripitaka is a rarer and more beautiful gem by far: she is his future, pulling him towards something brighter, the distant, gleaming light of a better tomorrow, and a better Pigsy to see it dawn.

**47\. harm (monkey/sandy)**

For the longest time, he was afraid to touch her at all, terrified of doing her her harm without meaning to.

Monkey was used to strength and solidity, to Pigsy’s size and raw power, to Tripitaka’s quieter passion, her fierceness and determination and inner fire, but Sandy was nothing like either of them; she was a walking wound, the jutting bones and scar-strewn sinew of survival, of starvation, of a thousand kinds of suffering he’d never known, things he couldn’t see and so didn’t know how to avoid.

With her, he had to learn a different way of touching, gentle and held-back; every time, it was a lesson in self-control, a lesson in restraint... a lesson, ultimately, in making himself as vulnerable as her.

**48\. precious (monkey)**

The trinkets and bracelets adorning his wrists were once the most precious thing in the world to him.

That was before he gave them all away: half to Pigsy, because he knew the big lug missed the weight of gold and silver, because he missed — secretly, privately, where he’d never admit it aloud — the decadence and luxuries of the life he’d given up; half to Tripitaka, as souvenirs of their first kiss, their first time, their first whatever; weren’t humans supposed to be sentimental about that stuff?

The last one he gave to Sandy; it meant nothing to her, but she could tell it meant something to him, and the smile on her face as she tucked it away, close to her heart, was more precious than all the jewellery in all the world.

**49\. hunger (sandy)**

They’re always hungry for something, or so it seems to Sandy.

For food, for sex, for adventure and excitement; every morning a new thrill, every evening a new desire, and she tries so hard to understand them, to make sense of their growling stomachs or the heat in their loins, to pretend that she feels it too, the pull of this or that when their eyes glaze over or start to gleam.

She tries, she really does, but sometimes they look at her, and that gleam in their eyes seems to fade a little, and she thinks they will always understand more of her than she ever will of them.

**50\. believe (tripitaka)**

She’s always believed in them; that was never a question.

The harder thing was learning to believe in herself: to see herself as worthy of the quest that chose her against all the odds, to be worthy of the name she took, the name that became more than just a title but an identity — _her_ identity, and her name as well — and perhaps, one day, to be worthy of her gods too.

It’s a hard thing, to believe in all that... but when they look at her, all three of them wearing the exact same look of starry-eyed reverence and love, she finds that maybe she does believe a little bit after all.

**

**Author's Note:**

> Marked complete for now, though I may add to it at a later date if I attempt another of the prompt tables.


End file.
